An electronic postmark, or EPM, provides content and temporal integrity and identification authenticity for data, which is transferred over a network. The process of generating an EPM utilizing a regular EPM server is described in “Systems and Methods for Authenticating an Electronic Message,” U.S. Ser. No. 09/675,677 filed on Sep. 29, 2000, which is expressly incorporated herein by reference.
The MicroEPM is a system and method for performing electronic postmarking of data without directly utilizing a regular electronic postmark (EPM) server. The MicroEPM permits the generation of an electronic postmark off-line, which allows mobile devices or devices, which do not have a network, interface, to create EPMs for internally generated data. Furthermore, the invention also permits devices, which are connected to a network to generate EPMs without having to interface with an EPM server. This capability could be useful when the processing overhead of communication with an EPM server is too great, or if the EPM server is unavailable due to network problems or server downtime.